It Is Not About Soy Sauce

It is not easy to quantify a cuisine like Chinese or Indian. These are two countries each has landmass larger than that of Europe, population greater than Europe and history far longer than that of Europe. A lot of different people have been living in greatly different climates cooking a wide range of food for millennia. It would be foolish to say a certain way of cooking or a certain set of ingredients defines these cuisines. Case in point is in last Wednesday’s NY Times. In the article “Craving Hyphenated Chinese” by Julia Moskin, she quoted Eugene Anderson, an anthropologist who wrote the book “The Food of China” saying, ““Chinese food is defined by a flavor principle of soy sauce, ginger, garlic and green onions.” and methods including stir-frying and steaming… “Once you get too far away from those rules, it is no longer Chinese.”” This may be true for the Chinese food you encounter in North America but certainly not in many parts of China. Many Buddhists do not eat garlic and green onions at all. Many non-Han Muslims do not much use soy sauce. Manchurians grill far more than stir-fry. In the north, they eat far more wheat than rice. To a Shanghainese, Sichuan food can be more exotic and difficult to take than French food. Different cuisines are ways to think about food. They express their own sense of aesthetics. It is not about the medium or techniques but the cultural logics behind them. This is why Chinese can make curries and the results are still unmistakably Chinese; and when Alain Senderens roasted his duck pékinois, he made a new French, instead of Chinese, dish.